Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  It was not accomplished overnight of course, but Hollywood was taking note of his ascension. No less an authority than veteran columnist Louella Parsons wrote, “Lee is in kind of a special category in Hollywood. He’s not really a star but sort of a secondary actor in status. But he’s never made it as a hero. He doesn’t look like a hero… Yet he is attractive in an offbeat way with his prematurely gray hair and his considerable sex magnetism. In this era of the so-called ‘anti-hero,’ who knows what Lee’s future might hold?”

  What the immediate future held would indeed be encouraging, but in the meantime, the ongoing frustration proved practically overwhelming. When he got lost driving home from a gin mill one night, he bought a map to movie star homes, only to discover he was not listed on it. “It was at that moment that I realized my career hadn’t reached the peak it should have,” he wryly commented years later.

  The frustration was partially as a result of his trying to decide on the right project. Helping with this process was his agent Meyer Mishkin, as well as his wife Betty, whom Marvin often introduced as his best friend and toughest critic. He was mulling over several possible projects and said at the time, “Whatever picture I do next had better be the right one!… I kinda like to wait until the last minute ‘cause then you know whether it’s raining outside or not. I like to know all the elements and what the chemistry will be…”

  Ultimately he chose a project he had initially resisted. “There’s a thing that happens with actors,” stated Meyer Mishkin. “They sometimes are governed not only about what they would like to do, but what a director is going to do…”

  In this case, the director was Stanley Kramer. Kramer liked Marvin from their previous efforts (Eight Iron Men, The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny, Not As a Stranger) and, through Mishkin, approached him with his next project. At first Marvin balked at the idea of costarring in a film version of Katherine Ann Porter’s bestselling novel, Ship of Fools. “Hell no. A book by a seventy-two-year-old broad? Not me,” he said. Later he added, “I didn’t like the book, Ship of Fools, but when Stanley Kramer told me the setup and who was going to be in it, I got interested and excited.”

  Kramer and scenarist Abby Mann had managed to condense Porter’s five hundred-page tome into a workable screenplay of multiple, disparate characters onboard a luxury liner from Mexico to Germany at the dawn of Nazism. Joining Marvin in the international cast were Austria’s Oskar Werner as the ship’s doctor, Puerto Rico’s Jose Ferrer as a strident Nazi, France’s Simone Signoret as an exiled patrician, Spain’s Jose Greco as a sleazy flamenco dancer, Slovakia’s Charles Korvin as the captain, Germany’s Heinz Ruhmann as a kindly Jewish businessman, and in her final screen appearance, England’s Vivien Leigh as a fading Southern belle. Fellow Americans Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal, Barbara Luna, and Michael Dunn rounded out the massive ensemble.

  The character Marvin would play was a conglomeration of several from the book, and, as the actor recalled, “In essence, it’s the ‘Ugly American.’ Stanley Kramer sent me the first forty-seven pages of the script, knowing it would interest me. I thought I understood that character. He’s an ex-ballplayer, a has-been, a washout, a drunk who’s spent his life pursuing Mexican whores—there’s a load of them aboard ship. He’s a childlike adult, a little afraid, trying to work out values in his own way… A little like me.”

  Marvin’s own description of the character was remarkably accurate, especially in reference to himself. The failed ballplayer drowning his troubles in alcohol and childlike behavior was an individual his wife was quite familiar with. “I think he drank sometimes to stop the pain,” theorized Betty. “He would withdraw so much. Once, I couldn’t find him. He was late for some kind of an appointment. I forget if it was an interview or something. The cars were in the garage, so he hadn’t driven anywhere. I called the neighbors. He wasn’t anywhere, and I’m looking all over. I finally find him. He was sitting in the bottom of the pool with his scuba gear on. Just sitting there. Is that a shock? I yelled at him, ‘You gotta come up now!’ It was amazing.”

  At the time Ship of Fools went into production, Lee and Betty were in the midst of a trial separation. There was not one particular incident that led to the separation, but enough had occurred to erode the marriage. Although Lee was older at this point, much of what he had experienced in his younger days still raged within and boiled to the surface on occasion. “Yes, he could be irrationally enraged,” recalled Betty. “He was always very gentle with me, except once when he thought I was his mother, then he tried to choke me, but that was very brief. He stopped it very quickly. But he could be very outrageous.”

  The most outrageous behavior meant something more dangerous. “Yeah, he got the guns out after a certain point,” remembers Ned Wynn. “It usually would happen if he started talking about his Marine days, and stuff like that. You got to understand that after a certain point, he’d just stop talking and he would gesticulate. He’d drink so much he couldn’t form words, and his mannerisms and gestures were supposed to convey all these different thoughts. He’d just say, ‘Got that baby?’ He’d wave his finger in the air like a gun and go, ‘Boom!’ He’d just go into the whole Marine-military-gun thing.”

  Real guns would be used on very rare occasions, such as when, after getting drunk, he would try to shoot the gong that was over the bar in their Santa Monica home. Another time, he was looking to shoot some squirrels that were perched outside on his tree. When Betty asked him what he was doing out there, he said, “If he just showed his head just an inch, that’s all I need.” In frustration once, he shot at the house. Where others would consider it crazy, Betty saw that as the perfect symbolic gesture. “He’d rather have been on Pluto than be tied down with a wife and kids,” she reasoned. “Those were the three times he ever fired a gun in the house. Otherwise, the guns were always, repeat always, locked up, and the kids never saw the guns.”

  Firearms were not the only weapons in his arsenal of anger and frustration. Betty recalls a bright and sunny afternoon at a restaurant that, after a few drinks, quickly turned dark and ugly: “We were at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Blvd. Traffic is crazy. Of course Lee had insisted on driving. Beverly and Paul Fix are in the back [with us] in this big convertible and we had the top down. Of course, he runs right into the car in front of us. He gets out of the car. Here’s this woman sitting in her seat, she’d just been hit and Lee says to her, ‘Start your car and drive away from here, or I’ll kill you!’ She is just beside herself. She drives on, you know the cops are coming. We drive away. He said to me, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. That’s it.’ The phone rings the next morning. Of course, he has hit the executive secretary to the head of the studio at MGM, I think it was. That’s who he hits. He’s ready to sue Lee, right? They had to quickly settle that. I must say, Meyer had his work cut out for him.”

  Such was the state of the Marvin marriage at the time Lee began work on Ship of Fools. He had moved out of the house and taken up residence in his dressing room on the studio lot. He and Betty kept in contact with each other, but for the most part, he lived a life similar to the one he was playing on film. He generally got along with the cast, one of whom noticed his similarities to the character he portrayed. “He would look at you from under his eyebrows,” re-called costar Barbara Luna. “He’d give you a look of, ‘Kid yourself, but don’t kid me.’ He was an honest guy, he really was.” Taking note of his drinking and the way in which it affected him, she added, “Any time there’s alcohol, comes anger. I think people like Lee drink that amount of alcohol, it’s really because they don’t like the way they feel. I really believe that. I really think we have to anesthetize ourselves, because there’s something always there that we don’t want to deal with.”

  It was at this point that the actor’s work and his personal life came to a head-on collision of sorts. “He literally would black out, and he could find himself in many, many compromising situations,” stated Betty. “It was very sad to have him say to me
after we separated… He was so frustrated at the end of our relationship he said, ‘I wish you would go out and have affairs. So that we could have equal footing.’ Doesn’t this sound like a man in pain? I said, ‘I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.’ I believe very strongly, not just talking about me, necessarily, I know in that kind of behavior, there’s a great need to sabotage happiness. I’m not going to analyze Lee, per se. I know we had so many good things going for us. He even said to me, ‘I’m so ashamed. I don’t think there’s anything I haven’t done to destroy us.’ Sabotaging his own happiness. It’s sad.”

  On the set of the film was a young brunette singer who had been hired as a stand-in at the behest of Barbara Luna. “I was in Robinson’s Dept. Store, and I heard this little voice behind me,” recalled Luna. “Now I’m pretty little, but there was an even littler person standing behind me. She was in tears. She said, ‘I’m at my wit’s end. I have nowhere to live. I have no job.’ She just about asked if she could move in with me. I was living in a four-bedroom house in Beverly Hills… I didn’t know her that well, but I knew her enough where it was really okay. You know, what always starts out as, ‘I’ll only be here for a week or two,’ of course with anybody, it turns out to be a little longer. So, I took her in. I went to [producer] Mike Frankovich and said, ‘She needs a job, and I need to come to you and see if I can get her a job as a stand-in.’ So, I took her in and got her a job. Of course, she was never around the camera whenever they needed her. She was busy chasing Lee. That was the start of their relationship.”

  The petite, wayward brunette was Michele Triola, and besides working as Luna’s stand-in, she can also be seen on screen as an extra in the film’s dining room scenes. Triola was recently divorced from actor Skip Ward, and struggling to make it as a nightclub singer, when she got the job on Ship of Fools. Lee was separated from his wife, binge drinking, and attempting to portray a character on film that was of a similar mindset. The stories of their meeting have varied sources. Triola often told an amusing tale of falling asleep in a deck chair wearing dark glasses while Marvin spoke to her at length. When he found out she was not listening but sleeping, he laughed and set out to talk to her all over again.

  Marvin crony Ralph O’Hara recalled a different version, involving Marvin’s stand-in Ty Cabeen. “Lee got drunk and he [Cabeen] put him in the [motel] room. Then, got Michele and he put her in there… He woke up the next morning with Michele. He had fucked and sucked or whatever. The next day, it was ‘Why don’t we go here or go there… During the trial in ‘79, [Marvin’s lawyer] David Kagon’s investigation found out that Lee was number five of people she was already blackmailing… Dave wouldn’t tell me who the others were.”

  Years later, Barbara Luna discovered that she proved to be an unaware player in the scenario. “I didn’t even know that they were coming to my house when she was still staying with me during the making of the film,” Luna said of the revelation. Triola told Luna about it a few years before Triola succumbed to cancer in 2009. “Apparently, she was bringing him to the house, unbeknownst to me, when I was maybe locked in my bedroom. I don’t know that they were doing any hanky panky. I don’t know even when they started their hanky panky. It could be that they were just getting to know each other. I don’t know. When she told me [years later] I was just, ‘Oh! I see.’ I didn’t hear anything.”

  Although producer/director Stanley Kramer had his hands full with the gargantuan logistics of the film and cast, one of the easiest tasks for him was dealing with Lee Marvin. Asked what impressed him the most about Marvin, he stated, “The first thing was his personality because he was full of defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms, so you couldn’t get to his real character which was very soft and generous and kind. He created an image of the protective mechanism to cover that. If you penetrated it, he felt somehow that you pierced his or ego something. But in a relationship, once you became personally involved with him, you realized how sensitive he really was; which was unusual for a man who had such a facade… God, what time he spent on the facade. I said to him one day, ‘Jesus, you waste a lot of time pretending that you don’t care.’ It’s true. He said, ‘You know I care, brother.’ Just like that.”

  When Ship of Fools was released in July 1965, critics lauded most of the cast, but found the film’s overall impact to be both preachy and somewhat melodramatic. The praise for Marvin was unanimous, especially for two key scenes. In one, near the film’s climax, he withstands a vicious beating from the heel of Vivien Leigh’s shoe when his character mistakes her for a prostitute. Marvin himself was so enamored with Leigh he kept the shoe as a prized memento.

  In an even more dramatic moment—one of the film’s best—Marvin’s ruined ex-ballplayer breaks down and confides to diminutive Michael Dunn about his failed career. Utilizing pathos, mime, and just raw human emotion, Marvin does the miraculous task of turning an unsympathetic character into a tragic member of the film’s title. “Among those that stand out in the best sense,” wrote Archer Winsten of the New York Post, “foremost is Lee Marvin, the ex-baseball player who could not hit a curveball, low and outside…” Stanley Kramer concurred: “I think he was a hell of an actor, much better maybe than he would admit. I think he thought so, down deep, in the pit of his stomach. But he didn’t look like a star. See, he was cast as more of a character lead. So, that limited role, to a certain extent, in a romantic situation, affected him. But still, that’s what made him effective in his relationship with Vivien Leigh in the picture.”

  Even before the release of Ship of Fools, Marvin was earning even greater praise for a film he made right after, but which was released just a bit earlier. The novel The Ballad of Cat Ballou by Roy Chanslor, had been floating around Hollywood since its publication in 1956, before the film version finally saw the light of day. Several well-known leading men had been considered for it long before Lee Marvin was chosen. “He was the seventh guy after six of them turned it down: Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, a whole list,” recalled Don Gurler, who worked in Meyer Mishkin’s office. “He worked it for $30,000, something like that.” Jack Palance lobbied hard for the part, but did not even make the list. By the time Lee Marvin had been approached, the film had evolved from a straight western to a comedy-parody.

  The executive producer, Harold Hecht, had just come off several recent high profile flops, including Taras Bulba with Yul Brynner. Several decisive changes to Cat Ballou were in the works, including the selection of who would ultimately direct the movie. According to veteran Western film director Burt Kennedy, “We had lunch in Bel-Air at Harold’s house. We made a deal for me to write Cat Ballou. When I came back, the phone was ringing and it was Harold, and he fired me!… Then they made it a comedy, and Harold gave me the script. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ I hadn’t done Support Your Local Sheriff or any of those others, yet. Of course, they didn’t have Lee and Jane Fonda at this time. If they had, I would have probably done it. At this point, it was early on, right after they had done a first script. Then I said [to Hecht], ‘I don’t know how to poke fun at the thing…’”

  Veteran TV director Elliot Silverstein was eventually assigned to direct, and remembered, “The first script was rather a female adventure story. It was [associate producer Mitch] Linderman, I think, that first came up with the idea of mocking it, doing a satire. [Co-screenwriter] Frank [Pierson] and I, each in our areas, took it one step further. What he did was really, I think, probably the key of the movie.” It was Pierson, who would go on to write such classics as Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon, who offered Silverstein this sage advice. “You must be careful. You’re dealing with an American mythological hero: the cowboy, the gunslinger.” Having worked in television, Silverstein was used to pressure, but had never before encountered someone as nervous as Harold Hecht, who wanted to increase the film’s chances of success by using a big name star.

  Silverstein was bedeviled by the casting choices he was given until The Wild One happened to be on television one nigh
t. Watching Lee Marvin fall off his motorcycle, Silverstein knew he would make a better choice than Hecht’s pick of either Kirk Douglas or Jose Ferrer. Silverstein recalled, “I was concerned that Kirk Douglas, as a major star, would not feel comfortable doing some of the crazy things I was going to ask the actor playing ‘Kid Shelleen’ to do. In fact, I had not the leverage that I would have liked.” When asked, Silverstein boldly stated, “I would like you try to get Lee. You got to try to persuade him.”

  Betty Marvin had read the script and passed it on to her husband during their reconciliation. “I told him, ‘It’ll get you out of playing the heavies. It’ll get you out of that whole genre. Do it. It’s like heaven-sent.’ Reading scripts, to me, is torture. It’s like a bad play. It’s hard work. But I laughed out loud. I thought, ‘Hmm, I’m laughing at a script?’ That, to me, was worth a lot right there.” Lee still valued his wife’s input, and when he agreed to read the script, he so loved the concept of playing both a broken-down drunken, gunslinger and his evil twin brother, he would often quote the dialogue at parties.

  Following his wife and agent’s recommendations, he read the script, and recalled, “I started laughing when I read the first line. I didn’t know how good it was, though. Nobody did. I thought it would just be another little flick. But the part of ‘Kid Shelleen’ hit pretty close to home for me. It became a reprimand of my drinking habits. I got a look at myself.” He signed on along with young stars Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, and Tom Nardini, as well as veterans J.C. Flippen, John Marley, Reginald Denny, Stubby Kaye, Nat ‘King’ Cole, and a youthful Jane Fonda in the title role. Several actresses had been considered, and when Ann-Margret later learned her agent had passed on it without telling her, she fired him.